Society

Somewhere on my coffee table lurks a recent Boden catalogue. It shows pictures of beautiful, healthy, impressively clean – and, of course, very well dressed – children. They spend their time cavorting on sunny beaches or striding down iconic London streets.  This week, images of children have provided a rare moment of consensus in our ongoing culture war. Promotional material for a new film coming to Netflix, Cuties (or Mignonnes in the French original) has sparked widespread condemnation for portraying a sexualised image of young girls. The publicity campaign shows the film’s scantily-clad child stars in a provocative twerking pose. Following a social media backlash and a petition, Netflix has

Italy was the first country in Europe to implement lockdown, so what can we learn from the country’s attempt to impose restrictions to stamp out Covid-19? And what does Italy’s experience of finding a path out of lockdown teach Britain as it emerges out of lockdown itself? Ten towns in the province of Lodi, Lombardy, and one town in Veneto were designated areas or ‘red zones’ on 23 February 2020: two days after the first Covid-19 death and three days after the identification of the first autochthonous case of Covid-19 (i.e. a case which could not be linked to contact with outsiders). By the time Italy’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte announced the

In the same way that airlines overbook flights, universities send out more offers than they have places for on the basis that many applicants will not make the grade. But what happens when most of them do? Airlines often use financial incentives to persuade someone to surrender their seat and similarly universities have been known to offer successful applicants thousands of pounds to defer. The exams fiasco means universities are now under even more pressure to make students a gap year offer they can’t refuse. Scrapping the exams algorithm and replacing it with teacher predicted grades meant that students from poorly performing schools didn’t miss out just because some computer code forecasted

Scottish hearts and heads Sir: Alex Massie ignores the evidence when he espouses the assumption that economic concerns no longer matter in great political decisions (‘Scottish horror’, 15 August). Compare, as he does, a future Scottish referendum with the 2016 Brexit vote. Then, around two thirds of the British electorate held ‘Eurosceptic views’ (so Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University tells us). But the barest majority voted to Leave. The cause is plain: the largest single motive for Remain voters was that ‘the risks of voting to leave the EU looked too great when it came to things like the economy, jobs and prices’. A Eurosceptic two thirds was whittled